HENRY

From the “we-may-have-oversold-this” quote file -

 “Tectonics [movement of Earth’s crust] was ultimately responsible for the evolution of humankind“

To the ancient Greeks, people speaking other languages often sounded like they were saying “bar bar bar”. The bar-bar speakers became known as “barbarians“.

How people hear and interpret other languages that they don’t speak is quite fascinating. Unfortunately, it’s often used derogatively (like the “barbarians” above). For example, I’ve heard the rather racist remark that “asian” people talk like this: “ching chong ching chong”.

I’m rather intrigued by this. What sounds are being chosen to “represent” the languages? Do English speakers pick the same sounds as being salient?

To start with, here’s a rather loving “barbarism” of a Bollywood style music video into English - my loony bun is fine Benny Lava:

Interestingly, there’s another rendition of this same video out there, which has a number of different barbarisms. In the first, we have “have you been high today”, whilst the second has “I’ll cook a haiku bread”.

So, what does English sound like to non-native speakers? Here’s how it sounds like to a German, and there’s a lot more English barbarisms on youtube.

New Science Editor Skeptical of Open Access Publishing.

I (and colleagues) have just finished writing the following paper that lays out our plans to Darwinize culture. In short, we argue that the best way to study how culture evolves is NOT to waffle on about memes, but to leave that aside for the time being. Instead, we can use phylogenetic methods to actually get stuck in and test hypotheses about cultural evolution. Along the way we review some of the new and cool work being done on language evolution, and lay out a conceptual framework for understanding evolution.

Our abstract says:

Current debates about “Darwinizing culture” have typically focused on the validity of memetics. In this paper we argue that meme-like inheritance is not a necessary requirement for descent with modification. We suggest that an alternative and more productive way of Darwinizing culture can be found in the application of phylogenetic methods.

We review recent work on cultural phylogenetics and outline six fundamental questions that can be answered using the power and precision of quantitative phylogenetic methods. However, cultural evolution, like biological evolution, is often far from tree-like. We discuss the problems reticulate evolution can cause for phylogenetic analyses and suggest ways in which these problems can be overcome.

Our solutions involve a combination of new methods for the study of cultural evolution (network construction, reconciliation analysis, and Bayesian mixture models), and the triangulation of different lines of historical evidence. Throughout we emphasize that most debates about cultural phylogenies can only be settled by empirical research rather than armchair speculation.

You can get the paper at my website, or our lab website. Comments would be most appreciated!

Bacteria with greatly elevated mutation rates (mutators) are frequently found in natural and laborator populations, and are often associated with clinical infections. Although mutators may increase adaptability to novel environmental conditions, they are also prone to the accumulation of deleterious mutations. The long-term maintenance of high bacterial mutation rates is therefore likely to be driven by rapidly changing selection pressures, in addition to the possible slow transition rate by point mutation from mutators to non-mutators.

One of the most likely causes of rapidly changing selection pressures is antagonistic coevolution with parasites. Here we show whether coevolution with viral parasites could drive the evolution of bacterial mutation rates in laboratory populations of the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens. After fewer than 200 bacterial generations, 25% of the populations coevolving with phages had evolved 10- to 100-fold increases in mutation rates owing to mutations in mismatch-repair genes; no populations evolving in the absence of phages showed any significant change in mutation rate.

Furthermore, mutator populations had a higher probability of driving their phage populations extinct, strongly suggesting that mutators have an advantage against phages in the coevolutionary arms race. Given their ubiquity, bacteriophages may play an important role in the evolution of bacterial mutation rates. (doi:10.1038/nature06350)

I’ve just come across the External Delivery website, and am shocked, SHOCKED, to find out that what I was taught in school was wrong!  -

External delivery refers to a scientific research program as well as a community of older kids, teachers, and other adults who seek evidence of external sources of Christmas presents. The theory of external delivery holds that certain features of how Christmas presents are delivered each year are best explained by an external source, not an internal source such as your parents.

Teach the controversy! (Thanks Natalie)

 A few good links have come my way in the last few days, so here they are:

• John Hawks has more information on new Middle Pleistocene hominid from Turkey, that I mentioned a few days ago, and also has a fun piece describing his recent paper about genetic introgression in humans.
• The folks over at Anthropology.net tear apart an article by Meredith Small calling personal DNA testing a scam ‘cos “if you want to know who you are, look in a mirror“
• Greater Blogazonia reviews the paper on genetic variation in Native American populations that we encountered two weeks ago  in “Genetics meets voodoo linguistics“.